August 21, 2005

Militias In Iraq

by hilzoy

The Washington Post has a terrifying article on militias in Iraq. Excerpts:

"Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country's divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists and Iraqi officials.

While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, the militias, and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them, are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments, the activists and officials said. In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents have said they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein.

The parties and their armed wings sometimes operate independently, and other times as part of Iraqi army and police units trained and equipped by the United States and Britain and controlled by the central government. Their growing authority has enabled them to control territory, confront their perceived enemies and provide patronage to their followers. Their ascendance has come about because of a power vacuum in Baghdad and their own success in the January parliamentary elections.

Since the formation of a government this spring, Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, has witnessed dozens of assassinations, which claimed members of the former ruling Baath Party, Sunni political leaders and officials of competing Shiite parties. Many have been carried out by uniformed men in police vehicles, according to political leaders and families of the victims, with some of the bullet-riddled bodies dumped at night in a trash-strewn parcel known as The Lot. The province's governor said in an interview that Shiite militias have penetrated the police force; an Iraqi official estimated that as many as 90 percent of officers were loyal to religious parties.

Across northern Iraq, Kurdish parties have employed a previously undisclosed network of at least five detention facilities to incarcerate hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and other minorities abducted and secretly transferred from Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and from territories stretching to the Iranian border, according to political leaders and detainees' families. Nominally under the authority of the U.S.-backed Iraqi army, the militias have beaten up and threatened government officials and political leaders deemed to be working against Kurdish interests; one bloodied official was paraded through a town in a pickup truck, witnesses said.

"I don't see any difference between Saddam and the way the Kurds are running things here," said Nahrain Toma, who heads a human rights organization, Bethnahrain, which has offices in northern Iraq and has faced several death threats. Toma said the tactics were eroding what remained of U.S. credibility as the militias operate under what many Iraqis view as the blessing of American and British forces. "Nobody wants anything to do with the Americans anymore," she said. "Why? Because they gave the power to the Kurds and to the Shiites. No one else has any rights."

"Here's the problem," said Majid Sari, an adviser in the Iraqi Defense Ministry in Basra, who travels with a security detail of 25 handpicked Iraqi soldiers. Referring to the militias, he said, "They're taking money from the state, they're taking clothes from the state, they're taking vehicles from the state, but their loyalty is to the parties." Whoever disagrees, he said, "the next day you'll find them dead in the street.""

A few examples:

"The Supreme Council has moved aggressively to seize control of police forces in towns like Nasiriyah, Amarah and Diwaniyah, aided by the party's control of the Interior Ministry in Baghdad. In February, 70 men belonging to its militia attacked the headquarters of the Nasiriyah police chief, Gen. Mohammed Hajami, in an effort to expel him. Dozens of machine-gun rounds and grenades carved holes in the building's facade. Although Hajami estimated that 70 percent of his men were loyal to Islamic parties and not him, he and a handful of loyalists fought them off.

Two months later, Hajami traveled to Italy for a training course. His security detail went on leave. While he was away, the Supreme Council's militia showed up again at his headquarters with four pickups and a police car, his aides recalled. The militiamen broke into Hajami's vacant office. This time, without firing a shot, the Supreme Council installed a new police chief. "If they control the police, then they control the city. It's the only power at present," said Hajami's brother, Kadhim, a police officer. "Even if the government falls, they are going to stay because they have the guns.""

And:

"On Dec. 5, local party officials ordered the director of a regional land office, Bahnam Habeeb, to disobey a central government edict to distribute parcels of land to former Iraqi army officers and soldiers. Habeeb, who decline to comment, told the party that he could halt the distribution only if he received an order from "a higher authority" -- either the provincial government in Mosul or the central government in Baghdad.

Fifteen minutes later, five pickup trucks filled with militiamen pulled up, according to witnesses. The fighters dragged the paunchy, 53-year-old Habeeb from his chair and beat him with their fists and rifle butts, the witnesses said. The soldiers placed him facedown in the bed of a pickup, pushed their boots into his back and legs and drove him around "to show everybody what they had done," said a witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. Sinjari said the Kurds had objected to the land distribution, but he was unaware of the incident.

"There is an absence of law," said a 40-year-old Transportation Ministry official who was detained for five days in Dahuk last month. The official said a Kurdish officer had accused him of "writing against the Kurds on the Internet."

"'Freedom' and 'liberty' are only words in ink on a piece of paper," he said. "The law now, it's the big fish eats the small fish.""

So: how did this happen? Spencer Ackerman wrote a good article about this in TNR a few weeks back; I meant to write about it but didn't. Since I think it's behind a subscription wall, more excerpts:

"When Larry Crandall answered his telephone in February of 2003, he learned that the Pentagon had not yet given any thought to the prospect of demobilizing either Saddam Hussein's army or the myriad guerrilla and militia groups fighting it. What security professionals call DDR--or disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of armed factions in the aftermath of a conflict--is among the most arduous challenges of any nation-building mission. Since every conflict arises from, and ends under, unique circumstances, there aren't many lessons from past DDR operations to apply "off the shelf," as Crandall observes. He should know: As a veteran usaid official, Crandall participated in sometimes-stillborn U.S.-run DDR programs in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Haiti. "But you see what happens when you don't have a DDR program," he contends. "You're going to have some level of armed confrontation with some elements."

On the other end of his phone was a military officer Crandall calls Colonel Jim, who was attached to the recently established Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (orha), the first incarnation of U.S. civilian authority for Iraq. Colonel Jim wanted to know if Crandall would be interested in sketching out a DDR program. "I asked, 'Why haven't you already done this work?'" Crandall recalls. "I didn't understand how screwed up [the reconstruction plan] was." Indeed, just weeks before U.S. forces invaded Iraq, the Bush administration had no idea what it would do with Iraqi soldiers and militiamen after the downfall of Saddam.

Nevertheless, Crandall signed up. In March, he flew to Kuwait City, where orha had set up headquarters at the Hilton Hotel in preparation for deploying to Iraq. In Kuwait, Crandall developed the contours of what he admits was "a pretty modest program." DDR offices would be established in the Kurdish north, the Sunni center, and the Shia south. Orha would inform ex-combatants that they were eligible for benefits if they reported to the offices for screening. There, an interview process would determine "whether they would go to jail, be pensioned out, kept in the service and perhaps retrained, or would go into a reintegration program, where they would be given a set of skills--computer training, for example--and released back into civilian life." The idea was to process the Iraqi military quickly and expand the program to the militia groups. "I didn't think this would necessarily work," he admits. "We wanted to start up the centers to see what would work on a modular, scalable, experimental basis. This was our best guess."

He never got to test it. Orha chief Jay Garner liked the plan, but, in early May, President Bush replaced Garner with Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, and orha became the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Crandall subsequently learned he wouldn't be continuing on to Baghdad and wouldn't receive an anticipated $70 million DDR contract. His contacts in the CPA and the U.S. military told him that senior Pentagon officials thought "no taxpayer money should be spent on a defeated force." Days later, on May 23, Bremer issued CPA Order 2, which disbanded the Iraqi military without attending to the future of its nearly 400,000 officers and troops. Crandall, stunned, thought that neglecting DDR for both Saddam's army and the militias was a dangerous mistake. But the incoming CPA director for national security, Walter Slocombe, had a more sanguine view of the militias."

Let's be clear about what we've just read. Possibly the most important prerequisite for having a functioning state is having a monopoly on the use of force. When someone breaks the law, the state should be able to go in and arrest that person without having to worry about the prospect of his commanding, or being part of, a large private army which can essentially go to war against the state. If you have a monopoly on the use of force, you can provide security for ordinary people, pass laws that will actually be enforced, and generally govern. If not, you risk ceding both territory and the power to govern to private actors. This is a very dangerous thing to do.

As any number of people told the Bush administration before it went to war with Iraq, under any circumstances Iraq is a messy, complicated country that is difficult to govern. If Saddam Hussein were deposed, it would be even more difficult than usual. There would be lots and lots of scores to settle, groups that quite legitimately felt that they had been aggrieved and needed to protect themselves, and so on. Moreover, under a dictatorship, the habits needed to govern responsibly tend to atrophy, since no one but the dictator is in a position to make policy decisions for which he or she will be responsible. (It's easy to decide what to think when nothing turns on your decision, and therefore you never have to take responsibility for things having gone badly. When this sort of armchair quarterbacking is the only thing you're ever in a position to do, the need for compromise, realism, and sober assessment of the consequences of decisions can fade from view.)

Moreover, we knew that there were armed militias in Iraq: both the Kurdish Pesh Merga and various Shi'ite militias, notably the Badr brigade. These would obviously have to be either disarmed or integrated into the Iraqi armed forces. And yet, as of February 2003, we had not begun to figure out what we planned to do about them. This is a level of irresponsibility that's just mind-boggling.

And then, after we throw together a plan, it's just scrapped, on the grounds that "senior Pentagon officials thought "no taxpayer money should be spent on a defeated force." " Just think about that one for a moment. Crandall was not talking about spending money to be nice to the defeated force. He was not proposing to buy Iraqi army and militia members little gold pins commemorating their years of service, or to send them off into retirement with a no-expense-spared going-away party. He was proposing to figure out which members of tha army and militias could be integrated into an Iraqi army, and to find ways of reintegrating the rest into civilian life that would minimize the chances that they would pick up guns and go out and wreak havoc. Which is, of course, what they have done. Instead, "senior Pentagon officials" decided not to spend money on "a defeated force." The very same defeated force that now constitutes a large part of the insurgency, as well as the militias that were never disarmed, and are now terrorizing the north and south of Iraq. What a brilliant decision.

At first, the militias were used rather tentatively, to provide security where the US and its allies were not willing or able to. But:

"Slowly, the larger militias and their political parties realized that the United States would not check their advances. Forces from the Badr Corps and the militia belonging to Iraq's oldest Shia Islamist party, Dawa, began to spread throughout the south. After the August 2003 assassination of sciri leader Muhammed Bakr Al Hakim, Badr marched black-clad militiamen to the shrine of Imam Ali, the holiest place in Shia Islam, while Najaf-based U.S. Marines groused about the "thugs" but did nothing. As the Badrists advanced, Shia clerics and local tribes convened their own bands of fighters to forestall sciri or Dawa domination. Most seriously, Sadr began building his Mahdi Army, which skirmished with Badr in Najaf for control of the Shia shrines and established its hold on the Baghdad slum of two million it renamed Sadr City. Indeed, as Sadr saw sciri grow stronger--with U.S. acquiescence--he felt the need to respond in kind. An Iraqi analyst told journalist Hassan Fattah for The New Republic in the fall of 2003: The United States "allowed the Badr Brigades to have some power, and now he wants some, too." (...)

[CPA director for national security Walter] Slocombe encouraged Governing Council militias to enter the nascent Iraqi security forces, but he was opposed to pressing the issue. "Our policy was: We're prepared to solve this over time and in a gradual way with organizations that will keep their forces under control and not become part of the problem," he says. He considered it the only realistic approach. Iraqi parties "are not going to give up their military power, which they regard, and not entirely unreasonably, as their ace in the hole ... until they're confident that the political process and the security structure and all that is working in a way that's acceptable to them," Slocombe argues. "As long as they don't actively cause trouble, we were prepared to tolerate a gradual approach."

That is, as long as they didn't cause trouble for the United States. What they did to Iraqis, especially moderate Iraqis, was essentially tolerated. Across the south, in late 2003, CPA officials began to notice a worrisome trend. Badr and other militiamen would perform what was euphemistically called "spontaneous de-Baathification"--assassinating those suspected of being members of the former regime. In one particularly controversial episode, Shia militiamen opened fire on a woman believed to have been a high-ranking Baathist, killing her and her baby. Then, in February 2004, Badr sought political "insurance" by flooding a Najaf "caucus" station with chanting, abaya-clad women intended to look like potential suicide bombers, in the hopes of swinging the selection of an interim government toward sciri loyalists. Pro-democracy clerics told their CPA contacts that they feared for their safety.

Additionally, the twin principles of gradualism and ignoring militias that didn't fire on U.S. troops allowed anti-U.S. militias to fester until they were strong enough to attack. That's exactly what happened with Sadr. Late in 2003, Sadr organized a violent protest of pushcart vendors outside the Imam Ali Shrine as a pretext to insert his operatives into the sacred (and strategic) location. "We began to see the beginnings of what would be the Sadrist insurrection," recalls a southern-based CPA official.

But there was little appetite to confront the radical cleric. A bedrock assumption of U.S. military planning was that the true threat to the occupation came from Sunni insurgents. Security in the Shia areas "was taken for granted," as the southern-based CPA official explains, since the Shia were believed to be sympathetic to the United States. When some American officials argued for preemptively striking the increasingly powerful Sadr, they were rebuffed. "My reasoning," explains one such official, "was tantamount to saying we had to open up another front." Only when Sadr launched his insurrection in April 2004 did CPA and military officials see their error. Major General Martin Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division that battled the Mahdi Army, told reporters in May of that year, "Clearly, in the six months between October and April, when [Sadr] instigated this national attack, he was training troops, gaining resources, stockpiling ammunition.... We missed the opportunity. We probably gave him six more months than we should have." "

As I see it, the fact that we gave Sadr six months in which to prepare to attack us is less of a mistake than the fact that we seem to have been willing to let the Iraqis do whatever they liked to one another, so long as they did not attack us. The insurgency was obviously attacking us, along with all sorts of other people. Sadr's militia built itself up and then attacked us. The other militias, however, seem to me to have been much smarter. They have recognized that they can operate freely so long as they do not challenge us. And really, what earthly reason would they have for doing so, if we are willing to let them do whatever they want? Eventually, sooner or later, the US will leave Iraq. At that point, whoever has the most power will be in a good position to control the country. If we are willing to let armed militias operate with impunity so long as they do not attack us, then (I would have thought) it's obvious that a smart militia leader would leave us alone and concentrate on doing whatever is necessary to ensure that he is in the catbird seat when we leave.

If our top priority was protecting the freedom of the Iraqi people, we would not allow this to happen. People are not free when they have to live in fear of arbitrary killings, abductions, and the like. Nor would we be doing this if our top priority was creating a stable Iraqi government. No Iraqi government can be stable if large private armies operate with impunity. And therefore if we wanted to create the conditions in which such a government could exist, we would have to try to eliminate those armies. The best way of doing so, obviously, would be to persuade them either to disband or to be integrated into the Iraqi military. We have been trying that for a year and a half now, and it is pretty obviously not working. That being the case, if we were interested in creating a stable Iraq, I think we should long since have taken on the militias militarily. (I don't mean that we should simply declare war on them, though I do think that if we want to provide the conditions in which Iraq could have a stable government and the rule of law, we should be willing, in principle, to do so. We could instead concentrate on preventing the militias from doing certain things that help them to gain power -- forcibly removing police chiefs, intimidating politicians, and so forth -- and move against them only when they violated the rules we laid down. That would, however, require us to be willing to explicitly guarantee security in a lot more places at once than we can at present.)

Of course, this would require more troops than we have. In some sense, that's the point. We could get more troops to Iraq, if necessary by instituting a draft. But we seem, as a country, not to be willing to do that. What that means is that providing Iraq with the conditions that would allow it to have a stable government is not as important to us as not having a draft. It would have been a very good idea for the Bush administration to recognize this at the outset. What it means is: if you want Iraq not to be a disaster, both for the Iraqis and for American interests, you have to do what's necessary within the very real constraints presented by the fact that the country does not want a draft. This would seem to me to imply the need to be absolutely sure that you've done the planning right, crossed your ts and dotted your is, because failure is a very real possibility that should be avoided if at all possible.

As we now know, the Bush administration did not do that planning, and if it recognized any constraints on its freedom of action, I saw no evidence of it. The result is that many Iraqis are living in fear, and also that whatever happens with the negotiations over the constitution, the likelihood that a stable and legitimate government will result is a lot less than it might have been. A civil war is also more likely. This was preventable; that it wasn't prevented is to our lasting shame as a country. We could have done so much better, if for some reason we felt we had to do this at all.

In 2003 shortly after the occupation began, the US made the decision to allow the militias to continue -- they had no choice. Not enough troops to provide security (which the militias help out on, along with their own agendas), and not enough troops to fight militias that might resist disbanding.

Militias are the future of an Iraqi armed force to fight insurgents. Pretending otherwise is just foolish. The US may hope to train non-militia forces to serve that role, but ultimately it will be militias. As more power flows to Iraqi factions, they will use the power of the state to further arm their militias -- not the reverse (disband militias in favor of a stronger non-partisan fighting force).

Finding a way to head off civil war is at the heart of all the major initiatives - including the talks over a new constitution - in Iraq. But by most common political-science definitions of the term, "civil war" is already here.

"It's not a threat. It's not a potential. Civil war is a fact of life there now,'' says Pavel Baev, head of the Center for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway. He argues that until the nature of the conflict is accurately seen, good solutions cannot be found. "What's happening in Iraq is a multidimensional conflict. There's international terrorism, banditry, the major foreign military presence. But the civil war is the central part of it - the violent contestation for power inside the country."

What this means in practical terms, is that an immediate US withdrawal isn't likely to bring peace to Iraq, say analysts. Nor is simply "staying the course," if it isn't matched by a political peace treaty among the warring parties - a role that a new constitution, facing a midnight tonight deadline, could fill.